Err_Eek

Pet peeve of mine: people who recommend textbooks they haven't fully went through.

Going through Aho's Compilers and Norvig's AI takes at least one year (assuming you have a day job).

And since the author of the blog post obviously didn't read the books, he doesn't provide any pros and cons to spending that amount of time into any of them.

I don't think that is entirely true -- surely, "hobbies" is a relatively new word, but even in pre-industrial times people had plenty of spare time to waste on stuff like learning songs/poems/card games/etc. Not every second was crucial for survival.

> The Union of Poland and Lithuania was automatically multi-cultural, multi-racial

That's seriously stretching the definition of race tho

This is really bad. It's a set of loose analogies that tries to borrow from the language of physics in order to justify some intuitions about software in general.

On a quick skim there was no solid empirical principle, only a couple of wishy washy equations thrown in to support some wishy washy principles.

At one point I a friend was mentioning the regex golf https://xkcd.com/1313/ comic and how some insane person on the internet solved it. I mentioned my pains with the regex bit of the Design of Computer Programs course, and how Norvig had some Chtulhu like ability to write regexes that befuddle mortal minds. Lo and behold, it had been Norvig all along solving that. Python notebook available in the pytudes above.

Tried to go through the course a few years ago. In my case it was the regex bit. Trying to write the code is a massive chore with with very little payoff for going through it, and needing to go through the instructions several times in a row. Gave up on the course there.

A person working with ML would have to sink in an incredible amount of time to go through all these books. Doubt I know anyone that read more than two of the listed books, even if I use ML on a daily basis.